You Want IT When?

There’s a lot of activity and promotion of the Agile software methodologies that can be found on both the Internet and in books today.  Its adherents are zealous in their commitment to the Agile principles codified in the principles behind the Agile Manifesto.    I first became interested in the Agile development practices when the Extreme Programming practices began generating a lot of interest in the software community.  My first reaction to this was to be turned off.  The name conjured up images of chaos, cowboy programmers, and death march development projects — practices I am all too familiar with.  I found the advocacy of pair programming to be unnatural and impractical.

After reading many articles published by Agile proponents, I remain steadfast in my beliefs that something is wrong, and rather than advancing the state of the art practices in Software Development, Agile proponents are setting us back, and in this world where jobs easily cross international boarders, especially easy in software, we need practices that demonstrate the value proposition for keeping teams here in the US: practices that deliver reliably and predictably on commitments and practices that can demonstrate improvements in productivity and quality.

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Does your final project schedule look identical to the project schedule that you began your release with?  If it does, you either aren’t managing your schedule or you are working on a dead product.  Project Management is predominantly an exercise in change management - so much so that I like to think of them as synonyms for one another. 

There are two primary sources of schedule change.  One source is when the actual productivity doesn’t match the budgets in your work break down structure.  The other source, the more problematic source of change, is when your requirements change.  This article will concentrate on managing changing requirements.

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“Another 30 defects uncovered yesterday,” reports the QA Lead.  “Ten defects were fixed,” reports the Tech. Lead.  Taken alone these are alarming statistics, and if they persist long enough, the release date would certainly be in jeopardy.

Many software teams struggle through the QA phase with great anxiety as they normally work through the phase without a compass: nothing to tell them whether they are on track or not.  How many defects are left?  Will we be able to fix all the defects before the release date?  Will we find all the defects before the release date?  These are a few of the questions that teams have anxiety about.  It’s only until a few weeks before the planned release date that they come to grips with the realization that they are in trouble.

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Have you ever been so frustrated with a piece of software that you wanted to scream?  I’m sure it’s happened to you.  You’ve just completed a part of your project that you’ve worked so hard to get right and then – poof — magically the application goes away and you just lost all of your important changes. It happened to me when I started to get involved in video editing. It was difficult to find an application that I could successfully complete an entire project.  I evaluated many of them before I settled on Adobe Premiere, and even that was buggy; it happened to be the best of the field of video editing applications.

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